Category: Did You Cast Anyone?

I’m getting ready to show my second feature Did You Kiss Anyone? at the Bagdad Theater on Feb. 7th. I tried to raise money for it over the summer of 2009 by doing a crowdfunding webseries called Did You Cast Anyone. I love Wainy Days and Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I wanted it to be like those, only less funny and without famous celebrities.

We only took a few hours to film each episode. It shows sometimes but that’s also what I like about them. The episode with Bryce was entirely improvised a few minutes after we met up to shoot it. Every single actor did an amazing job with improv. Working with funny actors who can improv is the best.I’d love to say the crowdfunding webseries was a massive success. But this was 2009 and Kickstarter was still in private beta and you had to explain to people what crowdfunding even meant. We raised a little bit of money, all of it from people I know, and it ended up being about half of what the movie cost, which is about one-tenth of the minimum budget it should have cost. I understand crowdfunding is the future and it’s revolutionary and all that crap you read on blogs, but it also sucks. It should be called crowdbegging. That’s what it feels like.

I’m rambling. Here are all the episodes of Did You Cast Anyone? If you’re in Portland, come to the Bagdad on Feb 7th and see these actors in completely different roles. I’m also going to be showing a Lost Episode (not an episode of Lost, but an episode that was never released for a variety of reasons).

Please take the next half hour of your life and enjoy….

Did You Cast Anyone?

Now that I’m (almost) done editing “Did You Kiss Anyone?” I’m planning a cast/crew screening. I made a list of everyone who helped make the movie in one way or another. Not just the cinematographer and actor type help, but people who let us use their house for a set. Owners of bars and cafes who let us film during off hours. A guy who grilled food for the extras while we used his friend’s house to stage a bizarre (and hilarious to film) orgy scene. Bloggers who visited the set, wrote about it, and then became extras. Even my dad, who went to a slaughterhouse to get an actual pig’s head for reasons I won’t go into here.

So far, the number of people who helped make the movie is over 100. Over one hundred! (I’m not even including people who shared a link to a casting call or trailer on Facebook or Twitter.) Those 100 people are people who took time out of their lives or opened their doors for someone that in most cases they didn’t even know. I doubt I’d met more than 20% of them prior to this movie.

I probably wouldn’t have started making DYKA if I knew it would take 100 people (not to mention over a year for just the production phase alone). And it’s staggering and humbling to think 100 people gave me the benefit of the doubt and said “yes” to whatever favor I was asking them. I’m excited to soon show them the movie we made. And even more excited to eventually share the movie we made with the world.

Since a lot of people were involved in getting locations or populating those locations up with people, I decided to make a map of all the Portland area locations we used, featuring images from the movie. (I’d recommend opening it in a new window).